Week 4 – Future trends, Organizational changes, the human face

Future trends

I often find these future-prediction-we-will-all-have-hoverboards-and-fancy-ai-assistants-things pretty lame, but Roberto dos Reis Alvarez did post a pretty substantial piece of curated content on LinkedIn Pulse today. He has many points, but the world is obviously complex and it makes it even more difficult to say how it’s gonna be.

In the last years I’ve been telling everyone, who wanted to listen to me (arguably not a lot :-)), that advertisement online has just gone completely wrong. Conversion rates are ridiculously low (check it out, we talk something like 3-5 % on average depending on industry) and I foresee that one day in the near future, a grown up will show up and ask “I don’t get it – why are we even doing this?“It would obviously be a “bomb” for the likes of Google and the big social media giants, but hey….maybe mankind would be better off, if we didn’t get bombarded with ads all the fr*king time….Interesting how ads will be in the future……

Organizational changes

In case it slipped some peoples attention, IBM acquired Red Hat last year. While coming from corporate America big-blue, I guess it’s fair to say that the two companies has different leadership styles. I didn’t say culture, I said leadership style. All IBMers were recommended to read “The Open Organization” by Jim Whitehurst (Red Hat CEO) and as the good soldier I am, I of course did that during my vacation last summer. Red Hat has a very open culture where almost every larger business and organization decisions are being discussed openly on – in their implementation – mailing lists internally. Many technical decisions and strategy discussions are even done completely in the open in the various open source projects (see https://community.redhat.com/software/) where Red Hat employees contributes. It’s a fascinating approach and sure must drive passion and dedication towards the decisions being made.I stumbled across a very interesting article this week, that outlines how Italian based Nebulab is having a similar approach based on RFCs just like when we defined how protocols and stuff should work back in the days:

The Human Face

I’ve talked about this before, but I’m fascinated about the various controversies that the larger technology companies must deal with and how they manage it. Jumana Abu-Ghazaleh has a point that it’s down to the specific branding on whether you keep a “human face” to the outside. She probably has a point. Facebook is that Zuckerberg-guy, Amazon is the bald Bezos-guy with that eye-thing, Oracle is that Larry-I-have-a-yacht-guy and…the list goes on. Google is…well, most people don’t know.